Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Joe College

I'm officially a student now. However, I wonder at the wisdom of going through with this. After all the years of jumping through bureaucratic hoops at colleges, I'm burdened with some excess baggage when it comes to dealing with any and all BS and my current employer seems to have a little bit of the Catch-22 in their DNA.

Last week there was supposed to be an express enrollment day at the college. I expected to see something set up in the commons area or the auditorium where you get in line and move through at a snail's pace but when you got to the end you were done. No such animal exists at our campus. I asked at the information desk where the express enrollment was and the main office was pointed out to me. I went inside the office, inquired about express enrollment and the nice lady told me that they didn't really do that here. I've had occasion to do business with this person before and she's an absolute sweetheart. I got a chuckle out of her when she lowered her voice, leaned across the counter and whispered: "It's a lie. Express enrollment, it's all a lie." Then she proceeded to tell me what my next step was (get a particular form signed by the instructor) and sent me on my way.

After getting the form signed a couple of days later, I returned the form to the office and was promptly handed another form the instructor needed to sign. Got that taken care of and returned to the office and was told that the lady in charge of processing the forms wasn't currently in her office but the lady at the desk said she'd see that it got signed and processed and returned to me. And she did. Even brought the paperwork out to me in the lab. Then I had to see the lady in the other section of the building to hand in my fee remission form who told me she'd send it off to another local campus, and they'd send it to another campus and then it would go who knows where, I lost track after about the fourth stop, and eventually it would come back to me. I'm real glad all these people are so pleasant and helpful. No way I'd go through all of this otherwise.

The total tuition for the class is right at $600.00. That includes the tuition fee, technology fee, materials fee, and the NIMS certification fee. I don't know how much I'll end up having to pay out of pocket but the tuition is two-thirds of the cost, so the max would be $200.00. The NIMS certification would look good on my resume if I ever were to send one out again. At this stage of my career, probably a better chance of it looking good in my obituary, but that's OK. So come Spring semester, I'll be a college student again learning CNC set-up and operations and, hopefully, making some motorcycle parts.